In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked, what’s it like to be a bat? I am not sure that this question has been answered satisfactorily, so maybe we should focus on a slightly more circumscribed variant of the same question: What’s it like to be a chess grand master? Cognitive scientists have been addressing this […]

Get ready to think of some antonyms. Ready? Now fill in the blanks: HOT-C____, SHORT-T_____, and LEFT-R____. Decades of memory research have converged on the strong conclusion that your memory for cold, tall, and right will be better after you generate them in response to the antonym cues than if you had merely read those […]

Imagine standing in an isle of cereals and you want to find THE cereal that has been advertised to you as exceptionally yummy and at the same time, exceptionally healthy—and all that for a great price! What will influence your decision regarding what cereal box you’ll eventually place into your cart, and how could companies […]

“Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst.” —William Penn There are many dimensions of human behavior. Consider a typical recognition memory task in which a participant is given a list of words to remember. A little while later, suppose this participant is shown the word “bear” and asked whether it […]